Review: S•O•L Strains of Life CBD Infused Water

SOL is a company that produces CBD enhanced supplements, skin and body care products, and now beverages, with the launch of a flavored water in a single SKU, Orange Pineapple. The product will eventually be part of a larger CBD Water lineup.

Let’s first discuss the technical details. Each flavor is, packaged in a 16.9 oz PET bottle and contains 5 calories and 0 g of sugar. The listed ingredients include “CBD Water” (alkaline water infused with 10 mg of CBD), natural flavors, erythritol, stevia, beta carotene, and natural preservatives. Finally, images on the company’s website shows this product as having clear liquid, but our sample bottle had was bright orange.

From a taste perspective, this product drinks like a diet flavored water. There’s some orange and pineapple flavor, but these are clearly from flavoring. There’s a modest amount of sweetness to the drink, but the flavor from the sweeteners is strong and lingers. If we’re comparing it to other diet flavored water beverages, it’s about on par, but we can’t quite say that we’d drink this for taste alone.

As far as CBD beverages go, this one is rather large relative to the CBD content that it contains-- not from an efficacy perspective (which is still not something that CBD beverages are able to quantify anyway), but in terms of product marketing.

Beyond that, the product’s branding and positioning are very focused on functionality and healthfulness. The tagline of “Revitalize your mind, body, & soul” doesn’t really mesh with the low calorie (not to mention erythritol and stevia sweetened) CBD flavored water that’s inside the bottle. Otherwise, what they’ve created is bright, attractive, and intuitive.

In the end, this is very much a product where we feel the marketing is at odds with what’s inside the bottle. Synching these up a bit more and improving the liquid would help this brand to capture a piece of the growing CBD beverage category. As it stands right now, we simply don’t think the liquid is good enough to get consumers coming back again and again.